SEATTLE– Accelerator Life Science Partners (“ALSP”), a leading early-stage life science accelerator and investment firm, today announced that its portfolio company, Lodo Therapeutics Corporation (“Lodo” or the “Company”), has been acquired by Zymergen Inc. (NASDAQ: ZY) for an undisclosed amount. The transaction is the third exit from ALSP’s investment fund, Accelerator Life Science Partners I (ALSP I), in the last year.
Lodo Therapeutics discovered and developed novel therapeutics to address undruggable targets by applying its proprietary platform to tap the vast collections of undiscovered molecules encoded in environmental microbial DNA.
“The Lodo Therapeutics metagenomic platform complements Zymergen’s discovery efforts by expanding their natural product discovery capabilities,” said Sean Brady, Ph.D., cofounder, Lodo Therapeutics and professor, Rockefeller University. “I am grateful for the support that the ALSP team provided during Lodo’s development and am eager to incorporate our technology into Zymergen’s platform.”
ALSP invested in Lodo as part of the Company’s $17 million Series A financing. ALSP managed the Company business, research, and development (R&D) operations for more than four years. In 2018 ALSP helped Lodo to establish a multi-target collaboration with Genentech worth up to $969 million. ALSP also recruited serial entrepreneur Dale Pfost, Ph.D., as the Company’s Chairman and CEO, and helped to fill key executive leadership positions as the Company graduated from ALSP’s operations.
“We are delighted to see Lodo’s technology, and their talented R&D team become a part of Zymergen’s innovative technology platform,” said Thong Q. Le, Senior Managing Director and CEO of Accelerator Life Science Partners. “Combining Lodo’s platform with Zymergen’s growing technology stack will create meaningful opportunities to access unique chemistry and to accelerate biological design and manufacturing. We look forward to the combined team’s continued successes as they work collaboratively to create and commercialize breakthrough products.”
